The Galaxy Tab S3 – Samsung’s New Hot Android Tablet!

Over the past couple of years, the Android tablet market has taken a big hit, with consumers moving towards iPads or window’s tablets. Samsung kept updating their android tablet lines but didn’t stop there, as last year they entered the market with a windows tablet (Tab Pro S). The company finally updated their android Tab S line by introducing the Tab S3, at MWC 2017.

The Galaxy Tab S3 is built with a glass back, unifying it with Samsung’s flagship lines. The Tablet is very stylish, but unfortunately a big fingerprint magnet. It has a 9.7 inch AMOLED Display which looks amazing and would be perfect for media consumption. Alongside Samsung’s great display, the company has placed a 4-speaker setup (Tuned by AKG). The speakers are set to provide a stereo experience by figuring out the orientation of the device, thus changing the speakers are left and right orientation. According to many reviewers who got to check the device out at MWC, this is executed really well.

The Tab S3 is not made to merely be a media consumption device, but also to serve as a productivity tool. The tablet comes with Samsung’s S Pen right in the box. The S Pen included with the Tablet is similar in its features to that of the Note series phones but very different in shape. The S Pen is a bit thick, which if you think about, is better as it would be more comfortable to those that constantly use it for note-taking and sketching. One disadvantage is that the S Pen has no slot in the Tablet, so you’d have to carry it around. Another thing that is good about the Tab S3, is the 32 GB storage capacity (yes, 64 GB would have been even better).

The Tab S3 S Pen features include (not all features are mentioned below):

Taking notes on the black screen display when the tablet is locked. That’s very useful to jot down some notes immediately.

Smart Select: Allows you to make a selection of what you are viewing to write notes on it, draw, or even extract the text from the image (text is copied automatically to your clipboard).

Translation: hovering over a word with the pen would show you its translation.

Handwriting Recognition: This is helpful if you want to take down notes, but you prefer writing rather than typing, then the S Pen can be used to write down notes which are then transformed into typed text.

So, to all those thinking: “how much of a productivity tool could an android tablet really be?” Well, I’ve been using Samsung’s Tab S1 almost since its release. I got the tablet mainly for media consumption and some slight gaming, but soon it became my main device for studies and work. I’ve always hated carrying my laptop around, and so the Tab S1 along with its keyboard cover made perfect sense. The only thing my tablet couldn’t replace was my notebook, which was why I’ve been searching for a new tablet recently. From the Tab A 9.7 with S Pen to the Tab A 10.1 with S Pen, the tablets seemed perfect except that they all came with a storage of 16 GB, which is just ridiculous. The apps anyone would download and use would fill up that available space in no time, and moving apps to an SD card is just a bad idea. Restarting the device, with apps installed on your SD card would sometimes lead to losing these apps and having to re-download them, and updating the apps would automatically move them back to the device’s storage.

This being said, I’ll be waiting to get my hands on one once the tablet is available in Lebanon for a full review of the device.